For every year, I'm listing every movie I've seen and compare them all to each other asking one question; Which movie do I like more. Movies that score in the 80th percentile or higher, advance to the next round: Favorite of the Decade. After each Decade is done, an All Time list will be formed.

Thursday, January 01, 2015

So back in 2012, I conducted an experiment with the movie Prometheus; I avoided the trailers, commercials and most promotional images. Though Prometheus eventually only placed 41st out of 87 movies at the time of being listed, the experiment was a success. I enjoyed the theatrical experience more than if I had seen the trailers.

Going into this year of movies I avoided trailers and commercials to every movie I wanted to see: 300: Rise of an Empire, Batman: Assault on Arkham, Winter Soldier, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Dracula Untold, Edge of Tomorrow, Godzilla, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hercules, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Interstellar, Jupiter Ascending, Justice League: War, Maleficent, RoboCop, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For*, Son of Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1, Transcendence, Transformers: Age of Extinction, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. An asterisk is by Sin City since I can't remember avoiding it's trailers, I would of though if I'd ever encountered any. I used to devour trailers as soon as they hit the net, and analyze each and every frame, now I wait until after I've seen the movie. The experience of each movie is more pure without the trailers guiding my level of expectation only to result in the movie being disappointing if the trailers have already shown the best stuff. It especially saved me from this crime...
This is the last shot of the trailer AND the movie.
So, you're sold an epic fight between Spider-Man and Rhino and get... nothing. I enjoyed Amazing 2 enough to joke that it was the best Spider-Man movie ever, merely horrible. Spider-Man is a relic of comicbook movies before Marvel Studios showed how it was done with their formula of loving the source material and making that love contagious. Audiences can now tell when a movie has the stink of being made by people who think comics stink.

Many think the current comicbook movie surge is fleeting, but it's box office dominance is guaranteed until the R rating becomes palpable again. Expendables 3 proves how the action movies we used to enjoy can't exist in a PG-13 movie world. When Captain America is in a bloodless brawl, it's expected, he's a superhero. When Jason Statham stabs, or machine guns someone in a PG-13 way it's less satisfying... no wonder the Web critics went crazy for Raid 2.

This year also represents the changing of the guard of my favorite movie franchise form the /Star Wars saga to:

I've been into Marvel comics since I was 10 years old, and their run of movies is like reading a stack of comics...

But when Captain America The Winter Soldier retconned the hell out of the MCU, transforming things as subtly as Obadiah Stanes speech to an entire subplot in Iron Man 2 it showed Marvel was playing at a different level. The fidelity to which characters, locations, themes and story are being translated to the screen are impressive, and what readers have always clamored for.

Moreover, Star Wars finalized the albatrossization of the prequels with:

More tearjerking than anything in the cinematic prequel era.

Clone Wars gets Star Wars, so does Rebels

But this blog and these lists are about movies, not television. We'll skip the pontificating on what is television currently, though the lines are being more and more blurred. I watched The Interview as a rental on YouTube. The MCU has Agents of Shield, and in 2015; Agent Carter, Daredevil and AKA Jessica Jones. Rebels and retroactively Clone Wars are canon with the movies. As for the Prometheus experiment, and the most anticipated, most unlikely certainty in the history of cinema. I knew I couldn't avoid the first trailer, that I'd have to drop off the planet to avoid it, so I just hope to avoid the next trailer...

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

59 movies and a year later, 2013 looks a lot different. Disney delivered their first animated classic since Mulan or Tarzan (1998 & '99) and their best since The Lion King (1994). Then a Korean director adapts three decade old French graphic novel and makes the closest thing in science fiction this generation has to Blade Runner (1982, the same year Le Transperceneige came out) or Brazil (1985), and truly I feel Snowpiercer falls neatly between the two. Okay, I need a sit down marathon of the variations of Brazil, I've been meaning to get and consume the different versions side by side and it's been too long since my last viewing of Brazil but until then I'll stand by Snowpiercer.

Only shortly behind the two aforementioned masterpieces stands... an almost overly prolonged entirely too protracted and only, again, ⅓ a movie...

Though, at the time of this writing I've sat through the nine hour marathon of The Hobbit theatrically. It alone as a singular work is only rivaled by the better two Lord of the Rings chapters, but sadly like with the animated Dark Knight Returns, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, and Mockingjay... these movies are doomed to hit these lists hobbled by truncation, but these movies are stronger for taking the time to tell their stories. Though the expanded cuts of the Hobbit trilogy will have a running time at parity with season four of Game of Thrones. Only their run times and general genre are comparable, Game of Thrones budget is only a tenth of what the Hobbit trilogy cost.

Joining the list at #6; a farewell to the possibly the greatest auteur ever...

His movies never felt compromised, never cheated the viewer and are never selfish all while mixing whimsy

I don't rank documentaries anymore. They get listed, put on the sheet for record, but not compared, not even to each other. It would be unfair to pit poignance against pedagogy. But three documentaries stood out:

Jodorowsky's Dune, and Drew: The Man Behind the Poster for I am first and foremost a space opera / sci-fi movie nerd. But, the most gratifying was Tim's Vermeer. When I was in school, it seemed like Vermeer was on the cover of every other art history textbook, accomplished with a taunting mastery of craft that few could ever posses, if any. Watching a software guy with no art schooling craft a replica of a Vermeer in a way that the artist may have used is a joyful thing.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Ties for first place between Ender's Game and Thor.
Then ties for third between four other movies
and both Ender's and Thor share individual match ties with ¾ of the bottom row.

2013, is like a good buffet or bad catering, no one selection wins your plate, but there's a bit of everything. There is no one movie to rule them all.

I made a change to scoring this year, documentaries will no longer be included, nor will they

If this movie were live action
it would have been the
biggest movie of the year

affect the score. Ties still are going to happen, after much internal debate about whether they're healthy for the system or not. But, I'd rather admit that a substantial percentage of the time, I like movies equally in head to head comparison. Thus far this year, no movie dominates the year. There was a brief Honeymoon with G.I. Joe: Retaliation, just as there was a long stint of being quite angry with Star Trek Into Darkness.
I hated Star Trek Into Darkness so much that when the Blu Ray arrived for me to watch with the family, I hate it even more... well maybe. Then, I kept it spinning in the player all of the next day, over and over and over until... it's the poster in the lower right of the collage atop the post here, and I've a 5" model of the USS Vengeance on my desk.

Planes and Gatsby are the middle of the list. Both have (at the time of writing, a .5, remakable at only how unlikely it is... or maybe for how likably bland they are...

Three movies though dominated getting talked about this year. Into Darkness, Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel. Looking at just the latter two, I think I hate these two movies as much as I can hate movies in their specific character niches. They're both angst ridden, unfulfilling, poor examples of their titular characters. They were both sources of Fanboy rage, where with each, I liked the source of fanboy rage in each... wha? (SPOILERS:) Yup, Neck snapping and Mandarin... I dig both, but the movies themselves are poor to unacceptable. THEY basically helped Thor to the top of the list this year, by being the solo follow-up worthy of The Avengers, and by showing how super a guy from an alien place could be in a BRIGHT RED CAPE. Without them, a movie could have been alone atop this list. A movie about a small guy taken from the quiet of his home into a group of brash and many cases, less than welcoming peers... something... something... Dragon ... Dragon Army? Describing Ender's Game sounded familiar for a second there... ;) On with the list for now:

Ender's Game

Thor: The Dark World

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: Part 2

Oblivion

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Pacific Rim

Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox

G.I. Joe: Retaliation

Now You See Me

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

The Wolverine

Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters

An Adventure in Space and Time

Scary MoVie

White House Down

Escape from Planet Earth

Evil Dead

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters

Movie 43

Epic

Gravity

Superman: Unbound

R.I.P.D.

Jack the Giant Slayer

World War Z

The Smurfs 2

42

Monsters University

The Internship

Turbo

The Host

The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

Man of Steel

Oz The Great and Powerful

Phantom

The Great Gatsby

Planes

The Incredible Burt Wonderstone

Iron Man 3

Red 2

Behind the Candelabra

The Purge

Iron Man: Rise of the Technovore

This Is the End

Parkland

Beautiful Creatures

The Croods

Lovelace

Europa Report

The Conjuring

The Last Keepers

Sharknado

The Last Stand

Syrup

The Colony

Texas Chainsaw 3D

Fright Night 2: New Blood

Dark Skies

The Lifeguard

Dealin' with Idiots

After Earth

Olympus Has Fallen

V/H/S/2

Parker

Computer Chess

Jack the Giant Killer

The Last Exorcism Part II

The Hangover Part III

The Heat

Age of Dinosaurs

Grown Ups 2

Pain & Gain

Identity Thief

A Good Day to Die Hard

Two Documentaries, were on the list; Blackfish and TWO Flight 800. I've decided to no longer compare Documentaries with the rest of the population of movies.

I may or may not make an update to this post. Perhaps if The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or The 47 Ronin or Despicable Me 2 break the logjam at the top in a significant way. Did I leave anything out?

Sunday, September 15, 2013

Though no year is ever truly closed, now that I've (finally) seen Braking Dawn Part II and 38 other movies since the "so far" list for 2012 later can be at least updated. True to self fulfilling prophecy, no movie dethroned the Avengers from the top spot, but no movie had the 'genetics' to even come close, and now I've seen all of the top 24 grossing movies of the year (domestically), and 40 of the top 50. But, if enjoyment of a movie is a self fufilling prophecy, or that this is just an inverted metric of dissapointment for least to most (2013's "So far list coming in just a few months!!!) then why bother watching so many movies? What's the point of watching something that I'm not looking forward to if I'm incapable of enjoying it as much as a movie I WANT to see? Surprise. Finding the movie that you had no interest in, that despite genre preference, desire to see it going into it, target demographic, and every other categorical disadvantage a movie may have... finding one so good that it surprises you, and satisfies you and wins you over... THAT's why I love to watch so many movies. I WANT to find movies to love that I didn't think I would.

2012 gave me not only one of the most fantastic, fanboytastic movies ever with The Avengers, it also gave me a movie that provided that sense of surprise, that brought me out of my genre comfort zones. I rented Pitch Perfect for my daughter on a night when she had a friend over. They'd requested it. Though I say I'm a total movie slut, and will basically watch anything, I had no plan or intention of watching this with them or at any point before returning it to the Redbox as soon as possible. The movie started, and I lingered a few seconds, and by the end of the opening scene I was hooked. By the end of it, I'd enjoyed a teen oriented musical comedy whose plot structure was closer to a sports movie than anything else. I still love it and have watched it multiple times now.

How did some of the other movies I HADN'T seen yet fare that I mentioned?

Lincoln: Wonderful, but I know not when I'll rewatch it again. Score: 0.604651163

Argo: I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would... Who'd have thunk anything about Battle for the Planet of the Apes would have ever been connected to an Academy Award!!! Now, we can't say EVERYTHING about it sucks... I kid, John Huston NEVER sucks, and with 15 Academy Award nominations and two wins, he alone gave at least part of Battle for the Planet of the Apes some respectability. Score: 0.73255814Zero Dark Thirty: Definitive. Score: 0.581395

Looper: Looper is a mess. It's a complete disappointment. I know, I LOVE Millennium (and it has "time quakes") and Back to the Future (and it has Marty McFly fading) so why do I hate Looper for a very similar botching of time travel. Timecrimes has nothing like those movies, shouldn't, by nature of why I HATE Looper, I also dislike Millennium and Back to the Future as well? Looper has three qualities that the other two don't; First, It practically breaks the fourth wall and tells you to just accept that it works and not to question it. This same 'explanation' was given for time travel in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. I love that movie too, but it's a comedy, not sci-fi. Second, it litters it's universe with almost as much availability of Time Travel as Star Trek. It's easier to travel in time in Looper than it is in Doctor Who with less repercussions (it does the same thing with psionics too). Lastly; Looper is cynical and condescending to it's audience. It's not alone, most bad science fiction dwells on explanation, and wants an audience that is stupid, ignorant and against using their imagination. I'm surprised I like it as much as I do. Score: 0.203488

Dredd: Um, first... I don't dislike Judge Dredd. It's probably the most I enjoy a movie with Rob Schneider in a prominent role, and the rest of the cast, and the visuals are wonderful. The new Dredd, is better. In another year, it could have easily been the best comicbook movie of the year. This year, it's got to take third place to only Dark Knight Returns Part 1 and The Avengers. I think Dredd would make better HBO style television than movies, but I think that of many super-heroes. An installment of screen Dredd every 16 years is too long, and this time the title character is note perfect. Score: 0.825581

Rock of Ages: Tom Cruise, and the music are this movie. Score: 0.575581

Breaking Dawn Part II: Yay! I did the whole thing! I'm done with Twilight movies!Score: 0.412791

The above movies mentioned in the "So Far" entry, and their current percentile ranks average .562, pretty close to the .570 that all the movies on the "So Far" list average with thie current scores. The movies I've seen since average only .413. Does anticipation or desire to see a movie increase the enjoyment of it? Or, do more appealing movies, the ones you'd enjoy more anyway have a way of mandating to be seen earlier?

Either or both, 2012 was a really fun year for movies.

(tie) The Avengers

(tie) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Skyfall

The Cabin in the Woods

Pitch Perfect

Starship Troopers: Invasion

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: Part 1

Cloud Atlas

Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn

John Carter

Justice League: Doom

Dredd

The Woman in Black

Men In Black 3

Iron Sky

Paranormal Activity 4

Brave

Game Change

Safety Not Guaranteed

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

Argo

Django Unchained

Total Recall

The Expendables 2

The Watch

William Shatner's Get a Life!

Dark Shadows

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Snow White and the Huntsman

Ted

Tai Chi Zero

Hotel Transylvania

The Hunger Games

Underworld: Awakening

Lincoln

Mass Effect: Paragon Lost

Zero Dark Thirty

Rock of Ages

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

The Man with the Iron Fists

Prometheus

Resident Evil: Retribution

Rise of the Guardians

The Amazing Spider-Man

Jack Reacher

The Dark Knight Rises

Frankenweenie

The Dinosaur Project

ParaNorman

Sinister

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2

Silver Linings Playbook

Wrath of the Titans

Unicorn City

House at the End of the Street

Piranha DD

Katy Perry: Part of Me

Mirror Mirror

John Dies at the End

21 Jump Street

Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days

The Campaign

Lockout

The Words

Chronicle

V/H/S

Les Misérables

This Means War

The Raven

Atlas Shrugged II: The Strike

Taken 2

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

Looper

Magic Mike

Ice Age: Continental Drift

Dr. Seuss' The Lorax

Life of Pi

Branded

Silent Hill: Revelation

Chernobyl Diaries

Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft

Man on a Ledge

The Grey

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Cosmopolis

The Master

Oh... one last thing. A movie was supposed to come out IN 2012, and didn't. G.I. Joe: Retaliation was supposed to be released on June 29, 2012 against Ted and Magic Mike. So imaging that G.I. Joe came out in 2012... It's score would be...

Tuesday, January 01, 2013

I've seen 48 movies from this calender year within the year itself, and there's still a few like Lincoln, Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, Looper, Dredd, Rock of Ages and even Breaking Dawn Part II that I'm yet looking forward to seeing. But, I doubt any of them stand a chance to top the years frontrunner. A good number of my favorite movies, not just movies I 'like', but ones that are a shoe-in for being in my pantheon of favorites are historic accomplishments in entertainment. Star Wars, the most successful film ever (or is someone going to pay a few billion to make sequels to Gone with the Wind?) Star Trek the Motion Picture, from cancelled TV show that didn't make it to even 90 episodes to being a big budget, high grossing, movie & television franchise spawning, behemoth... The Lord of the Rings Trilogy ('Nuff said). Tron Legacy, a sequel 28 years later! What Marvel did with The Avengers, and the movies leading up to it in the prior 4 years...

Just the poster for Avengers still gives me chills, like it's impossible to be real. It's a Wizard Magazine Casting Call column come to life! It's what comic fans have dreamed of; the simplest formula for Hollywood to have success with super-heroes. Don't re-invent the wheel. Respect the creativity in the comics, and just put them on screen, as uncompromised as possible.

One small disclaimer, on the numbers, The Hobbit tied with the avengers, but it's only ⅓ The Hobbit, so second place... makes the Hobbit : Desolation of Smaug 2013's movie to beat!

Sunday, March 04, 2012

At a convention better than seventeen years ago, a friend and I sat in on a game of GURPS, a role playing game. Most RPG's occupy a genre; Dungeons & Dragons : fantasy, Star Wars, Traveller, Star Trek and Alternity : space opera, Shadowrun : cyberpunk, and etc. GURPS isn't a playable universe so much as it is a system, a ruleset like D20 D6 or CODA. With GURPS, you can blend genres generically, blend games of incompatible rules systems, or make games out of properties yet to be licensed to a game publisher. It's something, at it's best is very special, and very relevant, it's a distilled blank slate.
Words and phrases can boomerang around a little. In psychology a blank slate, is the idea that who you are is not set at birth, that you can become anything; tabula rasa. We throw it into french, and apply it to politics, we get carte blanche, you have absolute freedom of authority, dictatorial power essentially. It sounds innocent and pure when applying it to a baby, but powerful when applied to authority. What was that word you just read twice? Authority.
The scenario of the GURPS session was 'a trip to the lake'. After all of these years, I still can't imagine why anyone would want to imagine, for recreation, packing up a truck and going to a house by a lake. If you're thinking that plenty of people do this, yes they do, in actuality. Role playing games should serve for the participants to imagine something they can't do. If you're rolling a D20 to see how well you mowed the lawn, you're more than welcome to mow mine. In that game, there was no UFO at the bottom of the lake, no serial killer of the GM's design (my friend had a different thought on that, to the protests of; "You're ruining our fun!"), no zombie apocalypse, not even monolith monsters. The GM had carte blanche, and failed to author anything that couldn't be accomplished by any group of people over 21 with at least one credit card and a drivers license between them.
Every film, novel, and comic book as well as every other artistic achievement, everything that is authored, has potential which is only limited by the author itself.
But the genres that take greater advantage of that, that require more imagination, thought, whimsy, or acceptance on the part of the viewer remain outside the mainstream of critical acceptance or regard for their artistic merits.
Our political discourse, and in many media outlets creativity, fantasy, imagination, and curiosity are continually challenged, ostracized and scorned. Antithetical to the negative rhetoric of our increasingly ignorantly judgmental society, is the popularity of the big Hollywood blockbuster, which is always said to have begun in 1975*

Monday, February 20, 2012

I was first made aware of John Carter of Mars by the Special Edition of the TV series of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I took from this that John Carter of Mars was to Carl Sagan, what Star Wars and Star Trek were to me. I've always wanted to know the inspirations for the entertainments I enjoy, if selfishly, just to find more to enjoy. This graphic shows only those that seem to be most directly inspired by John Carter.

Click for Larger Size

Captain Kirk and Luke Skywalker don't qualify for this list. Captain Kirk, and Star Trek stem from Forbidden Planet and it's Commander J. J. Adams. Star Wars was a re-invention of Flash Gordon. I'm sure I've missed some candidates, Colonel Taylor from Planet of the Apes comes to mind as a possibility.